This essay has been translated from Arabic.

My Beloved Gaza,

Wondrous September is here once again, stirring in my heart the sadness of one season ending and another beginning. It welcomes me with gentler breezes and warmer memories of you. And is there anything more tender than memories of picking olives from my father’s orchard?

I am a city girl, and all I know of life in the village is the farming taught to me by our garden plot. Yet that one connection bound me more deeply to the land and to ancestors I never met, but whose stories I learned by heart. I felt the lingering touch of their hands in the hollows of tree trunks we touched together, though across different times. I remember my grandfather’s old house with its tall doors and high ceiling like a cavern. It was a labyrinth of rooms opening onto one another, and it was the perfect place to play hide-and-seek. This house and its garden witnessed the succession of wars waged against Gaza, from the Nakba of 1948 to the ongoing genocide that began in October 2023.

My grandfather built the house with thick walls and a lower floor, below ground level. The bedrooms were installed there to shield the family during war. But he did not know that the genocide would obliterate it entirely, until nothing remained of it but the memories that dwell in my heart. In the garden grew pomegranate, sycamore, and guava trees, but the olive trees were the dearest and most precious of them all. How could they not be, when they supplied us with oil throughout the year? Over the years, I learned to distinguish between the trees whose olives would yield abundant oil and those that would yield less, and I trained myself to be gentle with the olive blossoms so that the tree might offer the finest of its fruit.

September in my memory means waiting for the clouds to gather in your sky and for the sky’s first gift of rain, so that we could cry out “Sallabat” — a term farmers use to refer to the first light rain in autumn — and announce the beginning of olive-picking season. Then came the labor of the harvest and its sweet toil. From dusk till dawn, we picked, gathered, and sorted the olives. Our hands would be stained with oil until they turned black. We pressed as much as our need required and packed the rest in sacks ready to be taken to the olive press east of Shuja’iyya, so that they may return to us as oil in yellow jerrycans to give to loved ones. And then there are the breakfasts in the morning: fava beans, labneh and cheese and za’atar, a cup of sage tea, and pressed olives cured with arugula leaves. The highlight of these breakfasts is a bowl of freshly pressed olive oil, with its delicious, tangy flavor and vibrant color. The days would pass quickly; as our elders say, “During olive season — you blink, and the day is done.”

Where is that September of old, Gaza? And what is your September like today, my darling? Where is my grandfather’s house? Where are the olive trees? Where is that exquisite oil from the orchard? And where are the yellow jerrycans we used to store the oil in? The very same yellow jerrycan that Refaat, in that famous photograph, was carrying while running to save the last of his oil. What remains of a Palestinian if they lose their oil, olives, and land? How will they survive? What will the Gazan do now when the first autumn rains fall? How can these scorched trees welcome yet another autumn? How can we get through the year without the olive harvest? And what remains of your autumn that I love, Gaza, the apple of my eye?

As evening approaches, my longing for you draws me out to walk through your streets. Walking through you has always been simple and delightful at once. The air is pleasant now, after a hellish summer. The tents line the edges of the roads, and the rubble of destroyed homes suffocates the streets, a sight that my heart will never grow accustomed to. People crowd into the al-Rimal neighborhood, a place that has always been known for how few people fill its streets. But now that the Occupation has swallowed up your east and north, where else can they go but west? And I move westward with them toward your enchanting sea, not knowing how I forgave it after it had been so harsh to me in the displacement tent. The sky is colored in sunset hues, and the sun is a departing orange fading like the oranges of Shuja’iyya, forgotten behind the Yellow Line. I sit on your beach, gazing at the sea, the only steadfast witness to what they have done to you and to us. Sorrows overflow. I pull them out like corpses that have melted beneath the rubble, carry them with me, and walk toward your sea, so the waves may kiss my feet. I scatter the sorrows, one by one, hoping you will swallow them and heal me…

I am writing this letter to you, Gaza, to tell you that, like you, I have survived — so far — and that despite all the cruelty and genocide we have endured, we are still together. And that, ironically, I still love you as I always have, and that you alone give meaning to my life and my existence on this earth. And that, like you, I will blossom just as you have blossomed after every time they tried to erase you, but history has not forgotten you.

I hope life grants us another autumn, my beloved, so that we might discover that what we thought had ended has not ended completely, and that the land that has carried our memory all these years still knows our names. And if September can no longer be what it once was, then let a new September come, one that resembles us: survivors, exhausted, but still here. A September overflowing with olives and oil, and overflowing with your eternal beauty as the seasons change, and may the sorrow that has taken up residence within us depart, and never return…

Perhaps September will never return as we knew it. Perhaps the garden will never be as it was, and perhaps I will never know which of the olive trees remains standing there. But I know that something of them remains inside me: in my hand that learned to touch the olive blossoms gently, in my memory that still knows the taste of freshly pressed oil, and in my heart that, despite everything, still knows the way back to you.

Love,
Nour

Nour Abdel Latif is a mother and writer from North Gaza. This piece appears in the twenty-third issue of The New York War Crimes. Read her previous pieces for the NYWC — Two Poems, published on October 7, 2025, a diary of displacement and sorrow, published on October 7th, 2024, and a diary of return to the north, published on March 30th, 2024.